Archivo

A cadre of international experts contributed to this book to provide a truly global perspective on the dangers inherent in our over-consumption of oil, gas and coal. Without fossil fuels, mass-produced food and clothing, international travel, cars, and many more things become rare or impossible. The authors provide details of the problem for a variety of countries, including the US and China, as well as those in Europe and the developing world.

The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. The Long Emergency brings new urgency to the critical issues that will shape our future.

Colin Campbell explains why, in a work that’s accessible to both layman and professional. The grand old man of depletion studies, and currently president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, Colin Campbell distils a lifetime’s study of oil reserves into this book. In his previous acclaimed book, the Coming Oil Crisis, he explained why a crisis was imminent. Now, in OIL CRISIS, he argues it’s here, and the world is hopelessly unprepared for the consequences. Well meaning enthusiasm for renewables and high hopes about hydrogen will be seen for what they are when the wells stop pumping. It’s a crisis of truly historic proportions. This is the book by the man who has the deep oil industry experience to properly unravel the issues, to illuminate for us the chamber of horrors into which we’ve just stumbled. To find out where you really are, read this book.

Draining the lifeblood of industrial civilization, the terminal decline of oil and gas production will spark a crisis far more dangerous than international terrorism, and just as urgent as climate change. World leaders know it, so why aren’t they telling? The last oil shock is the secret behind the crises in Iraq and Iran, the reason your gas bill is going through the roof, the basis of a secret deal cooked up in Texas between George Bush and Tony Blair, the cause of an imminent and unprecedented economic collapse, and the reason you may soon be kissing your car keys and boarding pass goodbye. David Strahan explains how we reached this critical state, how the silence of governments, oil companies and environmentalists conspires to keep the public in the dark, what it means for energy policy, and what you can do to protect yourself and your family from the ravages of the last oil shock.

In the waning days of the American empire, we find ourselves mired in crises, with multiple foreign-policy messes and our economy in steep decline. These trends mirror the experience of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Reinventing Collapse examines the circumstances of the USSR’s demise and offers insights into how we might prepare for coming events here in the US: (1) Mitigation—alleviating the impact of the coming upheaval; (2) Adaptation—adjusting to the reality of changed conditions; (3) Opportunity—flourishing after the collapse.

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.

Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a ‘clash of civilisations’, as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself.

This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world and shows how catastrophe can be avoided.